Traditional black fan tattoo with red accents on the upper arm, beside a grey ornamental panel design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace fan tattoo on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A folding fan with a scalloped, lace-like edge is tattooed on the upper arm, shown in two close-up photographs. The fan is filled with solid black, with a pattern of small red florets and red accents along its ribs, and a greyscale ornamental panel sits beside it. The composition is tight on the arm, with the lower photograph showing the design more fully.

Traditional Upper arm Fan Lace Ornament Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fan lived in a drawer in the tower block on Harrow Street, under a tea towel and a bundle of keys that fitted no door anyone could remember. Mrs Abernethy kept it there because her mother had kept it, and her mother's mother before that, and nobody had ever once opened it in the sunlight of the courtyard where the children played football against the bins.

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One February the lift broke for three weeks and the flats on the eleventh floor went quiet. Mrs Abernethy's grandson, who was nine and bored, climbed the stairs every evening with a torch and asked her to unfold the fan. She said it was too delicate. He said he would be careful. On the nineteenth night she gave in, and the black lace opened over the kitchen table like a night sky with red berries pressed into it, and the boy said the flowers were the same colour as the lift's emergency button.

She told him then about the widow on the ground floor who had waved it from her balcony every time a ship went out past the docks, and how the ships had come home. The widow was long dead. The fan had not been waved for years. The boy fanned himself with it until the kitchen smelled of cold stone, and when the lift started humming again on the twentieth morning, Mrs Abernethy found the fan folded neatly beside the kettle, with one red floret crushed flat in the scallop, as if someone had sat down to wait.